Tag Archives: class

Academic Twitter erupted this weekend following a Tweet from author and education guru Steve Perry. Perry claims on his website that he has been an educational consultant for a range of individuals and groups from the Urban League to President Trump. His biography proclaims his rise “from his rough childhood…through his graduation from an Ivy League school.” Perhaps with his own narrative of upward mobility in mind, Perry offered this advice to undergraduates:

I rarely hear ppl discuss what college students wear to class. Keep in mind, college is your JOB & the prof IS YOUR BOSS. Impress her.

Predictably, outrage followed. Perry received a torrent of criticism, nearly all of it justified. But it seems worthwhile to consider the tweet a little more deeply, and to explore the issues that it raises – many of which are major issues facing higher education today – in more substance than 140 characters allow.

College students dressed to impress?

The first flaw with Perry’s argument, as many on Twitter noted, is that college is, in fact, not a job. Undergraduate courses provide venues for learning skills of critical thinking and analysis, for deepening students’ knowledge of subject matter, and, ideally, for fostering personal growth and development. The claim that the professor-student relationship is reducible to terms of employer/employee demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the goals and nature of higher education.

Closely related is a second problem with Perry’s thinking: if students are encouraged to think of college in transactional terms akin to a job, professors might not like the conclusions that students draw. This became apparent almost immediately on Twitter:

The job analogy immediately raises the issue of money. Naturally, it occurs to students that, unlike a job where they would be paid to do work for their boss, at college they are paying to attend (and often incurring massive debt in the process). One can hardly fault students for thinking this way if college is framed in transactional terms. Faculty are well advised not to start down this road. College is not the same as work, and it shouldn’t be. Educators who attempt to conflate the two to serve their own interests do so at their peril.

The third problem with Perry’s dress-to-impress argument is the obvious one of economic inequity. As one professor noted:

I’m a professor, and do not judge students on how they look. That runs the risk of disadvantaging low-income and minority students.

To his credit, Perry quickly clarified that he did not mean that students must wear designer brands to impress their professors. Still, though, it’s impossible to ignore the reality that clothing is a key marker of socio-economic status.

I attended a high school that had a fairly strict dress code: khaki pants, white button-down shirts, or navy polos/sweaters. The stated goal was the minimization of perceived disparity among students. Except it didn’t. It was still obvious which students bought their khakis at Banana Republic and which students shopped at Target. By suggesting that clothing is any sort of metric for how students should be judged in class, Perry adds yet another obstacle in the path of students for whom college might already be source of stress.

There’s a fourth and final issue with Perry’s tweet. It has received the least attention, but it’s perhaps the most significant of all. Implicit in the tweet is the assumption that all “professors,” “students,” and “classes” are identical. In other words, the relationship between students and faculty, and thus the nature of the course, is the same whether it’s a Religious Studies, Computer Science, or Business class.

This assumption is false. Some college courses are more knowledge-based, with the professor guiding students to learn key facts and concepts. Others, such as the ones I most often teach, are skills-based seminars where the professor’s role is that of facilitator. Still other courses are experiential and take place outside of traditional classrooms.

The implied conclusion that all college courses are the same has pernicious implications. It suggests a one-size fits-all approach to higher education that all too often leads to the assumption that the purpose of college is simply job-training. And it’s courses in the Humanities – including History – that suffer the most from that mindset.

My goal here is not to simply demonize Perry. I suspect that his tweet had its basis in admirable goals: encouraging students to take college seriously and do everything in their power to succeed.

In this case, though, whatever good intentions lay beneath the tweet were quickly obscured. The end result was a message that conveyed so many of the false assumptions that imperil higher education in 2017.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing the New York Times’ “6 Books to Understand Trump’s Win.” Published on November 9, 2016, the list purports to help readers “understand the political, economic, regional and social shifts” that led to Donald Trump’s election. By publishing the list the day after the election, the Times doomed itself from the start. There are too many factors (racial, social, economic, cultural, global, political) to parse out a single definite cause. Nor did the Times know how the future Trump presidency would play out. Attempting to judge the historical impact of an event as it’s still occurring is impossible. As a result, the Times’ effort to explain the election tells us less about what really happened and more about what the Times thought happened. The newspaper’s reporting, editorial focus, and attitudes towards the candidates and their supporters shaped its response to the election itself. By focusing on the economic anxieties of the white working class, the Times’ list ignored the pivotal role that race played in Trump’s election. They also refused to recognize that race and class are inseparable in American history, hindering their efforts to contextualize Trump’s subsequent presidency.

Race, not white working class anxieties, explains Trump’s electoral victory. If he garnered so much support from lower class whites, then why was the median income of the average Trump voter in the primaries was higher than any other candidate? Does economic anxiety explain Trump’s attacks on Mexicans as rapists and criminals? Does it explain why he has described black urban centers like Chicago and Detroit as hellscapes plagued by gangs of murderous African-Americans? Does it explain the march in Charlottesville or Trump’s response to it? Those white men marching in their polo shirts and carrying tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” weren’t putting their economic anxieties on display. They were proudly displaying their belief in white racial supremacy. There’s no need for complex intellectual justification. If you chant a racist slogan or march under a racist symbol, then you’re a racist.

All these white men seem to be suffering economically

It’s hard for the Times’ list to tackle the issue of race when it only has books from white authors. And two of the books—Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Isenberg’s White Trash—go out of their way to brush aside racial questions. Isenberg’s desire is somewhat defensible as she argues that class inequalities are a structural feature rather than bug of American history. I would argue, however, that including race into her analysis would’ve strengthened rather than hindered her argument. Vance, however, has no such excuse. He chose to focus solely on poor whites because claiming that blacks are poor because they don’t work hard enough would invite charges of racism and hinder his ability to be taken seriously as a hillbilly prophet by the Times and other media organizations. By focusing on poor whites, he gets to spout right-wing propaganda while avoiding race entirely.

The Times’ list, however, isn’t entirely useless. Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land and Judis’ Populist Explosion help us understand the Trump phenomenon on the individual and societal levels. Hochschild’s empathetic exploration of the feelings of members of the Louisiana Tea Party allows us to see beyond a rational explanation for our behavior. She demonstrates how emotions guide the actions and beliefs of these individuals. She correctly recognizes that not all behaviors or beliefs have rational causes and understanding requires setting rationality aside. Judis contextualizes Trump’s authoritarian and populist appeals in the context of recent American and world history. He identifies a thread of right-wing populism that has become ascendant over the past generation. Yet his analysis is incomplete, especially since recent elections in Europe have seen a pushback against other Trump-like politicians.

As I wrote above, there’s no simple explanation for the rise of Donald Trump. No one book (or list of six) can delve into the myriad of forces that coalesced to elect Trump to the presidency. However, I can offer a few suggestions that I think will help start to answer some of them.

“The Real Story Of 2016: What reporters — and lots of data geeks, too — missed about the election, and what they’re still getting wrong” By Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight

Silver explores the media’s flaws in covering and shaping the election as well as their attempts to retcon their failure to predict the outcome.

Sides and Varek’s earlier book, The Gamble, identified the real factors that shaped the 2012 election and they had nothing to do with “binders full of women” or the “47% tape” or Obama’s poor performance in the first debate. Instead they focused on structural issues like economy, increased political polarization, and relative appeal of both candidates to explain the outcome of the election. Identity Crisis won’t come out until February, but it promises to be better than anything in the mold of Game Change.

This list, curated by two historians, was a response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that attempted to explain Trump through the works of almost exclusively white writers. Connolly and Blain’s revision does a much better job contextualizing Trump’s rise and focusing on right-wing populism, white supremacy, mass incarceration, immigration, sexism, Islamophobia, and transphobia.

Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash uses class and the history of poor whites to reveal the lie at the heart of the American dream. Isenberg seeks to tell a story that “we as a people have trouble embracing: the pervasiveness of a class hierarchy in the United States” (xxviii-xxix). The continual presence of the poor “reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward social mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable” (xxvii-xxviii). Something, she argues, is rotten in the United States.

Richard Hakluyt

American class hierarchies, Isenberg stresses, emerged from English ones. Proponents of colonial settlement, like Richard Hakluyt, viewed the Americas as “one giant workhouse” (21). England’s excess poor—too lazy to work for themselves—would migrate to the Americas where they would transform the themselves and the abundant natural resources around them into valuable products for England. Or they would die trying. These class concerns became a staple of early American political thought. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans believed that the frontier and westward expansion would deal with the problem of the poor. Appalachia, the Midwest, Kansas-Nebraska, California, and Oregon all served as opportunities for elites to rid themselves of their excess poor. Yet the problem never went away. There were always too many poor people and not enough land for America to become Jefferson’s ideal republic of small, independent farmers. By the late 19th century, with no more frontier to conquer, elites turned to eugenics and sterilization to solve their poor problem. Waste people, they believed, were morally degenerate, physically deformed and enfeebled, and incapable of elevating themselves from their own backwardness.

Throughout White Trash, Isenberg traces the historical origins of terms like “white trash”, “hillbilly”, and “cracker.” At various times, these epithets did not have wholly negative connotations. Davy Crockett embraced his “cracker” roots and played them to his advantage, using his fame to push for the rights of the landless poor. In modern times, pop cultural figures have embraced their white trash roots to demonstrate their own virtue. Sarah Palin bragged of her hunting ability and her role as a “momma grizzly.” The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame have parlayed their family business into a fleeting cultural phenomenon. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, similarly expressed pride in his hillbilly roots while climbing the social ladder. Yet Isenberg points out that many of those who came from white trash roots, like Vance, have forsaken their fellow poor. As she explains, “The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped from the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him” (277).

White Trash, however, is less successful when it tries to separate race and class. Isenberg contends that “Class had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race” (2). In recasting the Civil War along class terms, she ignores the racial views of poor white southerners in favor of elites. Well-to-do Northerners, she argues, viewed the Civil War as liberating both African-Americans and poor whites. Elite Southerners, meanwhile, attacked Northerners as race traitors for condemning their fellow whites to the permanent class of menial labor. In doing so, Isenberg minimizes the racism against African-Americans that existed across class lines in the South. In the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, white Virginians (in circumstances replicated elsewhere in the colonies) engaged in a conscious decision to elevate white skin over black in order to protect their own elevated position. This racial union explains why poor southerners fought for the Confederacy, terrorized African-Americans during Reconstruction, and opposed Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Isenberg largely ignores and underplays the importance of race in explaining the history of poor whites.

Isenberg’s White Trash serves as a powerful reminder of the role of class in American history. The American dream, she points out, is largely a myth, masking deeper and darker truths about the United States. We are not all equal, we are not all born with the same opportunities, and even our government institutions are infected by the power of elites. Political elites, she points out, mock the American dream: “Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game” (311). Yet by sidestepping the importance of race, Isenberg detracts from her own argument about the pervasiveness of class distinctions and inequality. As I wrote last week about Hillbilly Elegy, race, as history often reminds us, is inseparable from class.

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